A manufacturing plant or refinery (an “industrial facility”) may have several Control & Instrumentation (C&I) systems including one or more distributed control systems (DCSs), a programmable logic controller (PLC), a safety system, and applications for controlling its different processes. These C&I systems may be provided by different vendors. The C&I may have interdependencies by virtue of connections and references between respective C&I system elements.
Some examples of C&I system elements are tags which are identifiers (e.g., a name) for specific data points, logical items, and hardware items such as 110 modules, and controllers. Connections between C&I system elements can be logical where data transfer is accomplished by data protocols including Open Process Control (OPC), serial (e.g., Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)) or MODBUS. Connections can also be physical (e.g., using 10 devices) including wiring (or cable) connections for the data transfer. The elements in the C&I system can be referenced in human-machine interaction (HMI) displays, a history or a trend.
In modern plant engineering, C&I systems include C&I devices that link all plant components (processing units to their C&I system, and between respective C&I systems). The C&I devices include 110 modules that generally receive physical parametric (e.g., pressure, temperature) representations from sensors as standard current signals (4 mA to 20 mA). These signals are utilized by other various C&I devices including for regulating, safety, data acquisition and comparator systems for control, safety and instrumentation purposes. Specifically, conventionally various comparators compare the incoming 4-20 mA signals received from sensors against stored/set “set points” and create outputs used for plant safety, regulation, interlock or/and operation. When a C&I device goes down for maintenance, it is important to understand the usage of that device throughout all the associated C&I systems in the plant to identify and assess the impact of the proposed change. The impact assessment helps in ensuring that no process outage happens when the C&I device is undergoing maintenance or replacement.
Determination of interconnections between C&I systems and within C&I systems is conventionally performed manually to generate C&I system documentation. During IF troubleshooting of a process problem, such as a process upset, it is generally important to reference the system documentation to find the connections needed to understand how the different C&I devices are interconnected. Especially during trip analysis multiple level of dependencies need to be analyzed to establish the end-to-end data flow to solve process problems.